On Communicative Interference In Non-English Majors' Compositions From The Perspective Of Language Transfer And Contrastive Analysis

The utmost purpose of language learning is to express the ideas fluently and to convey the information so as to communicate in spoken or written English. Many students, however, encounter a lot of barriers in writing after the formal study for many years although their compositions sometimes are to the point. The common problems are obscure ideas, Chinglish, improper words, non-native languages and others so that the readers do not understand what the author means. Of course, it is difficult to say that they can communicate with each other. Therefore, the author of this dissertation makes an effort to analyze the communicative interferences (which are caused by the use of rules of speaking from one language when speaking another) in Chinese college students'compositions from Language Transfer and Contrastive Analysis.More specifically, the study will address the following research questions:1) What are the most common communicative interferences in non-English majors'compositions?2) What are the distributions of each type of communicative interferences in compositions?3) What are the possible causes of these communicative interferences in compositions?To illustrate the three questions above in detail, the author conducts an empirical study with the help of my colleagues. The subjects are some non-English majors from several departments and different grades of a university in Shenyang. They are required to write a CET-4-format argumentative composition about 120 words in 30 minutes. Six titles are given for them to choose, which are familiar to them and easy for them to understand. The contents are concerned with what is superficial in English and Chinese rather than those of intrinsic history and culture to reduce the influence of other cultural factors as possible as we can. The students are not told the research project beforehand, though some of them are asked to explain what the intended meaning is if the errors are ambiguous. The samples are from the compositions completed by the subjects. The interferences of lexical level rank the highest, most of which are inappropriate wording, literal translation, mixture of parts of speech, improper collocation, initial adverbials, and misuse of participles. In addition, the interferences of syntax level rank second, which are mainly composed of sentence fragment, position of attribute, subject—verb agreement, passive voice, comparative degree. The third is about the discourse level, mainly about lack of conjunctions, no logicality or coherence. What contribute to these barriers attract the author's attention. The author was surprised to notice, by analysis, that the interferences of mother tongue and the differences between English and Chinese thinking modes prevent the students from communicating in writing to some extent. Encountering the difficulties while writing, the students will naturally turn to their acquired knowledge, namely mother tongue. They will choose the words and make the sentences with mother tongue. In the same way, they will make the structures of the passage in the Chinese thinking modes. Although grammatical rules have been the focus of our teaching, students have less chances to apply them to practice positively and actively. Instead, they have more multiple choices to practise the acquired grammatical rules. Less output contributes greatly to communicative interferences in compositions.Based on the empirical study, the author proposes some constructive suggestions for foreign language studying. First, recitation should be paid more attention to so as to increase the language input. Enough input leads to the correct output. In addition, more writing exercises will be added.